Chris Brown, a commercial fisherman based in Port Judith, Rhode Island, has caught codfish, flounder, herring, squid, fluke, and other species all his life from the waters around Block Island.
After the Block Island Wind Farm began operating off Rhode Island in December 2016, many of the fish disappeared, he told The Epoch Times.
“The year that the towers were simply vertical structures and were not producing electricity, we caught significant amounts of codfish—20,000 to 30,000 pounds—fishing around the base of the turbines and a couple of miles away,” he said.
“After they hit the switch, I caught less than 100 pounds the following year.”
Conditions were perfect for herring last season, with water temperatures of 40 degrees—just what the fish like on their traditional migration route, which takes them from spawning grounds near Maine, around Massachusetts, and through the Block Island Sound, he said.
However, the Block Island Wind Farm now generates noise, vibration, and magnetic fields in the water.
Pile driving for South Fork Wind, located 19 miles southeast of Block Island, began in June 2023 and continued through the summer and fall.
“They come around Cape Cod and they are confronted with the construction and the existence of functioning wind turbines, and they don’t come inshore through Block Island Sound anymore,” Mr. Brown said of the herring.
“They travel well outside; they alter their migration; they turn around; they do something different. But I have not had any kind of a herring season this year at all.”
He has been a captain since 1979.
“I fished the same body of water my entire career—Block Island Sound, south of Block Island, Nantucket Sound, since I was a small boy with my grandfather,” Mr. Brown said.
“I have witnessed the changes. I have a pretty good working handle on how things work in Block Island Sound. And it’s frightening to see the changes that are coming at us.”
He doesn’t fish anywhere near the wind turbines anymore. He’s all but abandoned fishing for scup, also known as porgy. Although the species is tremendously abundant, they are no longer found in their traditional grounds.
Mr. Brown is president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fisherman Association, and he says other fishermen are reporting similar issues.
Crabbers say that when survey boats blast sound into the water to map the seafloor for new turbines, nothing crawls into their traps.
‘Catching Dead Scallops’
“We know for a fact that these things kill scallops,” Mr. Brown said. “A very prolific scallop bed just south of the turbines was going along OK. And then the most recent acoustic work that they did killed that bed. We’re catching dead scallops.”The wind farms aren’t only killing existing fish and invertebrates but also are exterminating future generations.
The South Fork Wind Farm is built on top of Coxes Ledge, a critical underwater geological formation where many species breed and grow. The wind farm has 12 turbines, rising to 840 feet above the water, and an offshore substation.
The substation collects power from the turbines and transmits it to shore via cables buried in the seabed. It’s a huge piece of machinery that’s built on a platform 150 to 200 feet above the sea.
Like a nuclear reactor, the machinery needs cooling.
“It’s taking in 8.2 million gallons of water a day to cool it,” Mr. Brown told The Epoch Times. “In that seawater are future generations of codfish, scallops, lobster, flounder, herring—all manner of marine life larvae.”
The larvae rise to the surface to feed on phytoplankton, which need ambient light. The substation intake valves suck up water containing the larvae, run it through the cooling system, and then flush the water out—except now it’s 90 degrees and chlorinated.
“The larvae are killed by virtue of being exposed to extreme temperature,” he said. “So it’s genetically cleansing the ocean of future generations of fish.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) determined that this will have “population-level impacts” on Southern New England codfish and every species that issues floating larvae, according to Mr. Brown.
“Population-level impact” is government-speak for “extinction.”
A study published in 2022 by the ICES Journal of Marine Science gathered data about fish populations around the Block Island Wind Farm from 2012, before construction, through 2019. It was funded by Deepwater Wind Block Island, which was acquired by Orsted in 2018.
The study highlighted a large increase in black sea bass, a fish that likes structures in the water. Atlantic herring declined during the survey period, which the report states was consistent with a regional decline.
The report also states that statistically significant effects were limited to little skate and winter skate. It didn’t provide detailed information on codfish.
“It doesn’t tell you what 100 turbines are going to be like,“ Drew Carey, the study’s author, said at the time, according to The Boston Globe. ”[But] it should allay the fears that there would be a catastrophic effect.”
Asked about the study results, Mr. Brown said, “When the developer pays for the study, you can pretty much bet he’s going to get the results he wants.”
Safety Risks for Commercial Fishermen
Decimating species is only one of many ways that offshore wind farms harm commercial fishermen. The towering turbines also create serious safety risks.“Our vessels are trawl vessels, so they have nets, and those nets skim the surface of the ocean floor,” said Meghan Lapp, who is the fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd., a Rhode Island commercial fishing company that harvests squid, mackerel, herring, butterfish, and other species. “We can’t fish in places like with big boulders because the net catches on them.”
Fishermen refer to boulders and other underwater hazards as “hangs.”
“If you caught yourself on a boulder, you could flip your boat,” Ms. Lapp told The Epoch Times. “If you do get caught on a hang, fisherman try to use the tide, and they try to maneuver the boat around to pop it loose.
“But you need space. And when you have a wind farm everywhere around you, you’re not going to be able to do that.”
Offshore wind turbines are typically surrounded by “scour fields” of boulders, some as large as a football field.
“Those are all now hangs,” Ms. Lapp said.
Buried cables connect the turbines to the offshore substations, and export cables connect the offshore substations to the mainland. The cable trenches may be covered by rocks or concrete mattresses, which create more hangs.
The bottom line is that trawlers can’t operate safely in a wind farm, she said. And it’s not only because of the hangs. Offshore wind turbines wreak havoc with marine radar.
On a circular radar screen, Ms. Lapp explained, an object in the water, such as a boat or buoy, shows up as a dot in the circle. This is called a “target.” A mariner can see it on the screen and watch it as it moves.
“What happens with the wind turbines is that they’re spinning these blades and it’s creating false targets,” she said. “And it’s masking real ones.
“So there are all these dots on the radar that aren’t really there. It creates a very confusing picture.”
Multiple wind farms, with hundreds of wind turbines, are planned for the heavily fished and transited area of the Atlantic Ocean off New England. Ms. Lapp said that for years, she has been trying to get the Coast Guard to conduct modeling studies of the radar interference caused by so many wind turbines, some of them taller than New York’s Chrysler Building.
“The Coast Guard wouldn’t do it,” she said. “Coast Guard vessels have the exact same radar as ours.
“So our radar is going to be interfered with. Theirs is going to be interfered with. Which means, how are they going to conduct search and rescue, especially if it’s at night in inclement weather? That’s when boats go down.”
The wind turbines will also prevent the Coast Guard from doing helicopter rescues, according to Ms. Lapp. Helicopters need to fly low to search for survivors of sinking boats, and they can’t do it on a wind farm, especially in rain, wind, and fog.
Yet government officials have assured commercial fishermen that they can work in the wind farm areas.
White House Wants More Wind Farms
On June 2, 2023, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other elected officials took a ferry trip to the Block Island Wind Farm. Ms. Granholm said the wind farm should serve as a model for the rest of the country, according to The Providence Journal.“We want to replicate this, even bigger, all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but also in the Pacific and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes,” Ms. Granholm said. “We want to be able to generate clean energy all across America.”
Ms. Lapp, Mr. Brown, and other commercial fishermen vehemently disagree.
“We have already witnessed a complete change in the ecosystem out there,” Mr. Brown told The Epoch Times.
“There are mussels out there that never existed. They are taking over. I can fill my nets with black mussels. Where did they come from, and why did it coincide with the arrival of the turbines?”
Last year, his catch was down 60 percent from the previous year. He believes that this is the beginning of the cumulative effect of ocean wind farms.
“No one understands what the cumulative impacts are going to be,” Mr. Brown said.
“In Europe, they have documented as much as a 60 percent reduction in primary systemic productivity in the areas around the wind turbine fields.
“If you are killing fish, and you are disturbing spawning, and you are eroding the pillars of productivity that give rise to everything including the oxygen that we breathe, it needs to be stopped.”
